With a new, wide-open green space, the 14th Latin Music Festival plans to broaden the experience when it gets underway Saturday for a two-day stand at Moncus Park at the Horse Farm.

The open area will allow Asociacion Cultural Latino-Acadiana, producer of the free fête, to pursue other aspects related to its mission statement regarding the organization and the festival.

“Landing at Moncus Park at the Horse Farm — it’s beautiful — it’s so large that we will be able to truly focus on, let’s call them the ‘neglected parts’ of our mission,” said ACLA’s Juan Paredes. “The festival in the past has been mostly about music and food.”

And now with the space, “we’ll be able to do a lot more with education, with community services having much more space,” Paredes said. “We have the ability to put as many restaurants we want there.”

“There’s a lot of things that fell into place,” he said.

Coupled with benefits of a new location, the festival has grown to two days.

“We believe we’ll be able to serve the city in unity — not just the city, but entire Acadiana — and continue to grow. This is just the first step.”

The free, family-friendly festival begins at noon on Saturday and goes to 10 p.m.; come Sunday, the festival runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and opens with a Zumba hour from Acadiana Zumba schools.

In addition to food booths by local restaurants, there will be arts-and-craft booths for children and adults, and a family area with entertainment and community services.

The festival and ACLA have two objectives, according to Paredes.

“One is to promote multi-culturalism,” he said.

Paredes said there are 19 different Latin cultures and two Hispanic cultures — so, 21 different cultures — “in a market of this size, and usually it’s a major city,” he said. “But we’re talking about the whole of Acadiana.

“But usually, they’re divided into different festivals and different organizations,” said Paredes, noting that Houston has seven different Latin festivals. “We do it all as one. We bring in the entire community and educate one another about what the other one usually does.”

“We do same thing with the non-Hispanic, the Cajun culture,” he said. “We introduce them to the diversity of Hispanic and Latin cultures.”

At the same time, “we turn the coin around,” he said. “We introduce the Cajun culture to the Latin and Hispanic cultures because it is our goal to unite the community — all cultures into one — to appreciate the multi-culturalism.”

An example of this can be found when Major Handy’s band and Merengue4 team up.

“We’re repeating something very beautiful that I really enjoyed in 2010 when brought in a classic merengue band and they played with Chubby Carrier,” said Paredes. “We exposed to the public the similarities between the original Cajun culture and Dominican musical culture and how they use the same instruments and how they came from the same origins.”

That’s something ACLA board secretary Ana Soriano can agree with.

“To be honest, Cajun culture and Latino culture is not that different,” said Soriano. “It’s really nice to pull that together and you can see like it’s not as different as everybody thinks. We like music and we like food.

“I believe that we Latinos like to dance a lot,” Soriano laughed.

The second focus is to preserve the Hispanic heritage for the new generations, and, for good reason.

“Most of them were born here; some of them came very young, and within two generations, they lose everything,” said Paredes. “They become completely Americanized and lose their language and everything.

“We try to make it appealing to everyone for them to still want to know where they came from, where their parents came from,” he continued. “What were their customs; the music, the dancing. All this and food and arts and crafts.”

And like all festivals, volunteers are at the heart of the Latin Music Fest.

“We do it with volunteers. They’re a group of people who believe in diversity and culture and bringing our communities together,” said Paredes. “And that’s what we’re doing.”